Respect one another within the group: all members
have something important to contribute.
Concentrate on learning the material and solving
the problems. Social talk is allowed but should not
dominate.
Everyone must fulfill their obligations as a member
of the group.
Each person must help to solve the problem. If
someone is not helping the other group members need
to encourage that person to contribute.
Each person has a role in the group beyond
problem-solving. These roles help to enable
communication with the teacher and the rest of the
class.
Never sit passively and let one person do all
the work.
Do not split up the work! Everyone works every
problem.
Group roles must rotate: each member of a
group can play any role for the first meeting.
After that they must take on another role at each
successive meeting until they have rotated through all
four. For example, if you are the
Reader at the first meeting then you cannot be the
Reader again until you have played each of the other roles exactly once.
Group Roles
Manager:
Serves as the sole verbal contact for the group with
the teacher
Keep people in the group on task and on time
Encourage everyone to participate and solicit every member’s input
Quality Control:
Reflects on group dynamics and whether or not group conversations promote learning
Report to manager with positive or constructive feedback
Troubleshoot with group members on ways to maximize learning
Report to teacher during group discussion about how well the group was working together
Write and submit a report about group dynamics and whether improvement is needed and why
Spokeperson/Recorder:
Report out loud in whole-class discussions; the spokesperson is the only person to speak at these times
Gather information from group members in order to write summary statements
Record summary statements about what was learned in each section by answering questions such as:
What facts did we learn here?
What skills did we learn here?
How does this relate to things we have already learned?
How does this fit into the ‘big picture’ of the lesson?
Reader:
Read aloud text, models, and questions
Facilitate discussion and interpretation of pictures
Record observations of models and pictures
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Participation
The teacher will observe you during group work and
assign you an individual grade. Your teacher will
classify your participation as follows:
Professional(100%)
this member always contributes to the group in a
positive manner and is always polite and
productive.
Journeyman(90%)
this member does the work, mostly helps the group
and is usually positive, polite, and
productive.
Amateur(84%)
this member does the work but is sometimes
impolite, nonproductive and/or negative and may not
work with the group.
Hacker(70%)
this member goes their own way but gets some work
done and may contribute to some small degree.
Wanna-be(60%)
this member tries sometimes but is mostly
uncooperative, nonproductive, impolite and/or
negative.
Anarchist(25%)
this member doesn’t buy in to the whole
“group thing”, makes essentially no
contribution to the group and gets practically no
work done